Action, Knowledge, and Will

Human agency has four irreducibly different dimensions -- psychological, ethical, intellectual, and physical -- which the traditional idea of a will tended to conflate. Twentieth-century philosophers criticized the idea that acts are caused by 'willing' or 'volition', but the study of human action continued to be governed by a tendency to equate these dimensions of agency, or to reduce one to another. Cutting across the branches of philosophy, from logic and epistemology to ethics and jurisprudence, Action, Knowledge, and Will defends comprehensive theories of action and knowledge, and shows how thinking about agency in four dimensions deepens our understanding of human conduct and its causes.

Table of Contents:
Preface 1: Agency and the Will 2: Action and Integration 3: Acts and Events 4: Voluntariness and Choice 5: Desire and Intention 6: Reason and Knowledge 7: Knowledge as an Ability 8: The Road to Larissa Appendix: The Modern Theory of the Will Endnotes Bibliography Acknowledgements Index

About the Author :
John Hyman is a Fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford, Professor of Aesthetics in the University of Oxford, and Editor of the British Journal of Aesthetics. He held a Getty Scholarship at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, in 2001-2002, a Fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2002-2003, and a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship in 2010-2012.

Review :
Action, Knowledge, and Will is a splendid book--insightful, original, elegantly written and carefully edited, and a genuine pleasure to read. John Hyman weaves strands of historical, legal, empirical, and conceptual analysis into a series of arguments that are fresh and exciting at every turn. John Hyman is one of the most creative and wide-ranging philosophers working today. With this book, John Hyman has done more for action theory than anyone in the field since Anscombe. His arguments in support of the thesis that human agency is best conceived as the integration of four dimensions presents a new picture that, in time, will change the way everyone thinks about human action. [T]he most important treatment of action since Anscombe and Davidson ... It takes the traditional question whether we should give a physical, ethical, psychological or intellectual account of human action and stands it on its head. For Hyman argues that the real question is how to distinguish the physical, the ethical, the psychological and the intellectual dimensions of human action, and he thereby changes the landscape in the philosophy of action. John Hyman brilliantly tackles a problem that has rankled since Plato: what is involved when we voluntarily perform an action? "The will", he argues, has been made too much of a catch-all of the various dimensions of human agency -- physical, psychological, ethical and intellectual. Philosophy is all about fine distinctions. Here they are made acutely yet accessibly to give us a new picture of who we are. John Hyman's new book is a masterful blend of the philosophy of action and epistemology. In it he seeks not only to realign the philosophy of action, but to turn epistemology -- at least, that part of it that is concerned with the nature of knowledge -- into a part of the philosophy of action. ... Hyman's book is an invitation to a radical new research programme in epistemology. I hope that others join him in working it out. How could knowledge be even better for us than true beliefs that we have good reason to accept? John Hyman answers this question in Action, Knowledge, and Will. It is by no means the only question he answers in this rich, delightful book. He reaches fresh, insightful conclusions about human action and thought by attending to connections between questions usually treated separately. He explains and defends those conclusions sharply and carefully, with admirable regard for what the words involved in the question actually mean. [A] vast improvement over the anti-psychologistic accounts of reasons-explanations that have proliferated in recent years. It both allows us to emphasize reasons why as facts that favor actions while allowing us to include an agent's psychological states in genuine reasons-explanations. ... While he challenges many widely endorsed views in contemporary philosophy of action, Hyman does not adopt an unprincipled contrarian stance. Rather, he strikes me as a friendly critic, offering ways to correct mistakes philosophers have made in the past three hundred years.